Steve Ballmer has just announced that in the first three days of being on sale, more than 4 million people have bought the Windows 8 upgrade. This doesn't count OEM installations or Microsoft's own Surface - just individual upgrades. Definitely a promising start for Windows 8, but then, these are most likely enthusiasts (I'm one of those four million), so we still don't know a whole lot. I'm patiently waiting for the response from regular consumers.

I suspected it might be a problem because I could be caught with a pirate copy of Windows.

I was afraid of being fined. Not that it wouldn't work.

Then you should have clarified that at the outset. The way you worded it, you suspected the upgrade would fail due to running a pirated copy and then it failed. I'll take you at your word that that is what you really meant all along, but you really should have said so outright instead of dragging this out.

How could any of these problem possibly be linked to piracy? Seriously, how?

Not necessarily the piracy itself, but the methods that might be in play to cause the install to pass activation. Those methods often alter or even delete critical system files, and if your source was from a black hat organization instead of grey hat, it's entirely possible there is a rootkit on there.

Hackintoshes run into similar issues on upgrading; often one has to move their modified kernel extensions to a safe partition before performing OS upgrades, even point releases. Then the hacked .kext files are put back in place.

Like I said before, it's likely those are separate issues. But to claim 100% certainty under your installation conditions is a logical fallacy.

No, I shouldn't have. I don't have to explicitly state my position on everything on the off chance someone may misinterpret what I'm saying. The onus in on you to make sure you have a thorough understanding before you get on your high horse, and hurl abuse at people.

Whether or not piracy can cause some upgrade issues on hackintosh machines does not make the issues I raised any more likely that they were caused by piracy.

There is no possible way that piracy could have contributed to a screen resolution issue AFTER INSTALLATION.

The is no possible way that piracy could have contributed to my WMC key taking 3 days, WHICH ISN'T EVEN AN EVENT TAKING PLACE ON MY PC.

There is no possible way that piracy could have contributed to me not being able to select the full upgrade cause I had WMC installed, since the installation routine actually had website links explaining this scenario! THIS IS CLEARLY BY DESIGN.